Tony Garnett

The sufferings so far are mere hints of what is to come as it gathers momentum. The precipitating cause of each mini disaster may seem to be political – a civil war here, a spontaneous uprising there – but underneath you find land degradation, toxic poisoning, rising sea levels and “natural” disasters exacerbated by human action.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Cathy Come Home. Cathy Come Home let everybody off the hook. It didn’t put the boot in where it should have done. Earlier this year I wrote a piece for the PCS Union explaining why I believe this.

Show they’re just two wings of same party. But they don’t want you to know that.

Callaghan’s Labour government in the ‘70s favourably discussed plans for the sale of council houses but lost to Thatcher before it became settled policy; the Tories thought through the wizard idea of the Private Finance Initiative. A no brainer. Build new hospitals and keep the debt off the government books.

I wrote this seeing my granddaughter in an Aston Villa shirt. Aila’s three. I wish Barry Hines had read it. He would have understood. Why do so many of us give pain to our children? We knowingly condemn them to suffer, year after year. Then watch this pain with pride. Are you one of the guilty parents?

Management was one of the biggest con tricks of the Twentieth Century. It was a useless and exploitative artefact, turning a simple job into a “profession”, with its own jargon and meaningless qualifications.

Steve Hilton’s defence of capitalism on Today was the mirror image of those Stalinists defending socialism in my youth. He should read Adam Smith:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”. – Wealth of Nations, 1776

I’ve been a trade unionist all my working life. I have always believed that in unity is strength. But for me economism, the trade unionism of not a penny oﬀ the pay, not a minute on the day, is not enough. I’ve always been on the side of revolution, by which I mean a qualitative shift in the power relations of society, so that workers control capital.

Read him in today’s @guardian. Brilliant. Read “The Global Minotaur” plus “And the Weak /suffer What They Must?. And weep”.
But wait? Democracy in Europe for sure, but what do you think about democracy in Britain?
Probably the same as Gandhi thought when asked what he thought of Western Civilisation. “I think it would be a good idea”.

Blair, the man who stole the Labour Party and delivered it to Thatcherism, is now in a different frame of mind. A Land Tax, no less. A tax proposed a century ago by the Liberals, taken up later by Labour, and defeated by the land owning Tories in the Lords. It is indeed a no brainer.